Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 9)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part IX, Prescriptive Realism

David Baggett

Hare finishes the first chapter of his book by laying out prescriptive realism as it connects with the concessions he’s listed (E1-3 and R1-3). He returns to the example of Peter and Sue. Peter judges that the relationship with Sue is worth saving and that this is what God wants from him. The judgment is not merely a report that he feels pulled towards reconciliation, but it expresses his acceptance of norms that prescribe that kind of response to his situation. He is judging that the situation deserves this kind of response.

There are three elements here: first, the initial construal of his situation as calling for reconciliation; next, the concern that is taken up into the construal; and then the endorsement of the construal in his judgment. He is claiming in this judgment a Kantian kind of objectivity (E1). He is judging that people like him should respond to this kind of situation in this kind of way.

He is also attending to the situation in a way that involves self-discipline, an “unselfing,” since his natural inclinations tend towards giving up (R1).

In making the judgment he is also claiming objectivity in a different sense, claiming that he is responding to a pull by the relationship that is really there outside his present imperfect attempts at evaluation (E2).

But this pull is not independent of him in the sense that it would be there whether he is there or not. This kind of pull is from relationships in which humans are embedded, and would not be there without them (R2). Suppose Sue is not a religious believer. Peter and Sue can still agree that reconciliation would be good, even though Peter will identify God’s call here and Sue will not. Prescriptive realism is not itself committed to theism.  

Finally, when Peter endorses the feeling of pull, he is endorsing not just his feeling on this particular occasion, but the whole set of norms that prescribe the kind of response (E3). In saying that God wants him to be reconciled, he is not merely claiming to report God’s mind, but claiming to be part of a structure that he accepts, a structure in which God calls people to the same kind of faithfulness that God has, and in which living that way is consistent with their happiness.

God’s call comes to Peter, Hare is supposing, through the pull of the relationship with Sue. In the same way magnetic force cn come to an iron ring through other iron rings that are attracted to the original magnet. This is Plato’s image in Ion 536a. So there are three levels of the analysis: first, the cosmic, where we talk about the call; next the level of the human species or the community, of nature or second nature, where we talk about the kind of felt response the norms prescribe; and last the individual, where we talk about the initial response and the endorsement by the agent himself, the endorsement not only of the particular attraction but of the whole structure in which people are attracted in this way.

Hare hopes to have shown that this three-level analysis also gives us promising conceptual space for an account of God’s authority in human morality. Roughly, we can say that God created us with an emotional and affective make-up, such that we feel the pull of God’s call. But value judgment is more than just feeling such a response; it requires us to endorse or to refuse to endorse this response. Unfortunately, we are now in a condition in which the response, both immediate and reflective, is skewed by self-preference. Having identified the source of the pull towards the good, however, as God’s call, we are now in a more promising position to identify when it is in fact operative. To this Hare turns in Chapter 2.

Part 8


Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 8)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VIII, Norm-Expressivism

David Baggett

Allan Gibbard denies the new-wave realist claim that value properties have causal effects on the world, but he does think that a causal process operates in the world to produce our affective response mechanisms, and that this causal process results in our good. This is what Hare calls the “third expressivist concession.” Gibbard thinks that the moral emotions such as guilt and resentment are themselves the fruit of a beneficent causal process, though the process is not benevolent because it is not personal (it is evolutionary). The emotions are good for us because they enable coordination, broadly conceived.

His view is that evolution selected in favor of affective dispositions in us which promote coordination, and hence the human goods that are available only through coordination. In particular, evolution gave us specifically human kinds of anger such as outrage and resentment, and it gave us the feeling of guilt, which is an adaptive response to anger because it invites reconciliation, and thus promotes cooperation instead of conflict between the parties. In the case of such emotions, Gibbard thinks that it is good for us that we have them. This is the first kind of causal process he discusses, the process by which we have been given through the emotions a route to coordination.

A second kind of causal process connects these emotions to the stimuli to which they are responses. Gibbard wants to find an account of practical rationality in a broad sense, which will give us the kind of objectivity we want. For an agent to judge that her action is morally reprehensible, he says, is for her to express her acceptance of norms that impartially prescribe, for such a situation, guilt on the part of the agent and resentment (or anger) on the part of others.

There is an important truth here that prescriptive realism can incorporate. The truth is that a value judgment endorses not just the particular response but the whole causal network of typical situation and emotional response to the situation invoked by the evaluative term. When judging something to be wrong, she is expressing her acceptance of the whole structure in which she is embedded, in which people respond in this way to this kind of action. What Gibbard has added is the widening of the scope of the evaluation to include this whole structure.

Hare wants to do something different from Gibbard, but faithful to the concession as just formulated. He’s going to give a Kant-style argument for what he will call a “postulate of prudence,” that an agent has to assume that the world is such that her evaluation of something as good to pursue is consistent with her happiness. The connection with Gibbard is that Gibbard uses evolution as a substitute or improvement on the doctrine of providence, but the realist implications are the same in either case.

The argument for the postulate of prudence proceeds by pointing out how many assumptions are required by an evaluation of something as good to pursue. Hare will mention five: (1) I have to assume that the good I pursue can be achieved. My emotions and desires have to be coordinated with the way the world is such that my basic concerns fit at least roughly what the world allows. (2) I have to assume that the good I aim at is possible as a result of my effort. (3) I have to assume that I can will my good not merely at the moment but consistently. (4) The goods I pursue are at least by and large consistent with one another. (5) I have to make assumptions about other people, that what they evaluate as good to pursue is at least roughly consistent with what I evaluate as good to pursue.

When Hare adds these five assumptions together, and supposes the world is such that they are all justified, then he will have postulated, when one evaluates something as good to pursue, this evaluation and pursuit is consistent with one’s happiness. But there are challenges to such a moral postulate. In the face of the ever-present possibility of a pessimistic outlook, we need a kind of realist faith, that the world and we ourselves in it are in fact governed in such a way that these five assumptions are legitimate, and our pursuing some good is consistent with our happiness.

We can then interpret the hints of fit we get as signs of the truth of a larger picture in which the good is, so to speak, more fundamental than the evil. There’s no inconsistency between such a faith, realist though it be, and expressivism as Hare’s defended it. What expressivism adds is that in an evaluative judgment I have to put that faith into practice in my decision about when to endorse and when to withhold endorsement.

Part 7

Part 9

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 7)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VII, New-Wave Realism

David Baggett

The third realist concession is related to the fact that Moore argued that it was fallacious to identify value properties and non-value properties. The new-wave argument, for example that of David Brink, is that the failure of property identity does not follow from the failure of meaning identity. The “third realist concession” is that a value term and a descriptive term that do not mean the same can point to the same causal property.

Brink denies what he calls the semantic test of properties, which is the claim that synonymy is a test of property identity. His move relies on developments in the theory of meaning and reference. Putnam’s thought experiment about Twin Earth can help explain this. Suppose a world much like Earth except that the oceans and rivers are filled with a liquid that looks and tastes like water but is actually not water, but XYZ. The property being water is identical with the property being composed of H2O molecules, even though the terms “being water” and “being composed of H2O molecules” are not synonymous.

Brink is chiefly interested in defending the identity of goodness with a natural property, roughly human flourishing and what produces this. Hare prefers a supernatural property—recall Mackie’s point that objective prescriptions did make sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver. The question at issue is whether to accept the proposal, following the new-wave realists, that being good is the same property as being commanded by God, even though “good” and “commanded by God” do not mean the same. (Hare admits here that “right” would be the better term to use, but he’s following Moore here.)

Hare thinks a version of Moore’s open question argument still applies even after the changes in the philosophy of meaning and reference that he’s described. In a Moral Twin Earth case, those in Twin Earth might use “good” to commend, but what they commend is something different. Hare thinks that an essential function of the term is retained, even though the criteria of application are different. The controlling function of a term like “water” is to give the natural kind, not the phenomenal meaning. But surely we would say that the inhabitants of Twin Earth are using “good” in the same way as us, namely to commend, but with different beliefs and theories about what is good. An essential function of “good” is to commend. Within a value judgment, the function is to endorse a commendation.

The Moral Twin Earth case shows us that, unlike in Twin Earth, the underlying structure (e.g., being commanded by God) does not in the case of “good” give us a sufficient base for the use of the term, since we also need to know if what is being called good is being commended. When we call something good we are not merely pointing to the causal property but expressing some act or disposition within what Hare calls the orectic family.

The divine command theorist can point to the underlying structure of a thing’s being commanded by God, and can claim that many people use the term “good” without understanding the structure. There is a property that the use of term “good” points to, namely, the experienced causal property that Murdoch calls “magnetic”; but using the term “good” in a judgment is not merely pointing to this property, but endorsing the attraction. When we experience this force as a call and endorse our attraction to it, we are judging that the force is a call that deserves our obedience.

Hare considers a merit of DCT to be that it can account for the ways in which theists and non-theists both do and do not use the term “good” (and other value terms) in the same way. They are both using the term for an essential function, which is to commend. Moreover, they are both using the term in a value judgment to endorse an attraction toward something. But the believer identifies what it is that is attracting or pulling her as God’s call, and the non-believer does not.

Corresponding to the phenomenal definition of water will be the definition of “good” as “the most general term of commendation.” But unlike the case of “water,” this will be an essential function of the term. Our practical lives of drinking, washing, and swimming correspond to our practical lives of advising, approving, and admiring. In both cases there’s an underlying structure, but people can use the terms “water” and “good” without knowing this structure, and many people do. If the believer is right, the non-believer will in fact be picking out this causal property when she correctly calls something good, even though this is not at all her intention.

We are responding to something that is already there, a felt causal force. But to say that the structure would be good whether commended or not is, if we read it one way, a mistake in philosophical grammar. It does not make sense to say that something is good that is not evaluated as good. It’s tempting to say something is good if it’s fit to be commended, but this in itself is a term of evaluation.

 Part 6

Part 8

Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 6)

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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part VI, Disposition Theory

David Baggett

The second realist concession is that values do not have to be seen as real independently of general human dispositions to respond to them in a certain way in appropriate circumstances. McDowell’s view of color is that an object’s being red should be understood as its having the disposition to look red to us in appropriate circumstances. Here we have a new account of objectivity. We could correctly call color, on this view, subjective and objective.

We can make an analogy with values. We can understand an object’s having value as its having the disposition to produce responses of a certain kind in us in appropriate circumstances. Values can be called subjective and objective with equal correctness, in the same way as colors.

McDowell also wants to deny the strict distinction between cognitive capacities and non-cognitive ones like desire, and hence to deny that “pure facts” and values can always in principle be disentangled. (Altham coins the term “besire.”) The central cases are content-full (“thick”) value terms like “gentleman.” McDowell proposes that we can only know how to apply a value concept through a criterion if we are inside the evaluative framework or the form of life that places value on it. Then our confident use of the value concept is natural to us; it becomes “second nature” by enculteration and habit. McDowell wants to deny that seeing the value in this kind of case has to be distinguished as a desire rather than a belief, something non-cognitive rather than something cognitive, a state of the will rather than of the intellect. He thinks we should see values as being there in the world, making demands on our reason, but not there in the world independently of our dispositions to be moved by them.

But this raises a relativistic challenge. Remember Mackie’s concern about variability in ethical belief, which he attributes to people being involved in different ways of life. McDowell tries to answer this by appeal to Aristotle, but if our second nature is allowed to be culturally variable, then values tied to second nature will be culturally relative and may be corrupt. The problem in Aristotle is systematic. He thinks he has a culturally mediated human universal. But his view of the chief good for human beings includes as components both power over others and prestige, both of them competitive goods. It is this, not just his application of the view to women and slaves, that is objectionable to a supporter of altruism or even impartial justice.

Aristotle isn’t wrong to say we aim at such competitive goods, but he’s wrong to derive from our naturally aiming at them the conclusion that they are good. He doesn’t make Murdoch’s (and Kant’s) concession about the corruption of human nature both at the individual level and at the level of the group. From the perspective of altruism or impartial justice our nature, including our second nature, is radically liable to endorse what is not good. So second nature does not provide the kind of guide to moral truth that McDowell needs.

On Hare’s view an evaluative judgment involves some state like a motivation, or a desire, or a concern, because the function of the judgment is to endorse or withhold endorsement of some such state. The notion of endorsement he presses acknowledges a magnetic center, in Murdoch’s term, and on the agent’s side, a sense that there is an “I” who has developed a consistent position to take in normative discussion.

Part 5

Part 7